Confirmed: Thrashers moving to Winnipeg

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Crack out the champagne glasses, Winnipeggers, and pour yourself some bubbly. It is now a done deal.

The National Hockey League will be coming back to Winnipeg, a well-placed, independent source has confirmed to QMI Agency.

Speculation continued to mount this week that an official announcement could come as early as Tuesday that the Atlanta Thrashers would be sold to Winnipeg-based True North Sports & Entertainment.

While the exact announcement date remains unclear, it has been confirmed to the Sun that an agreement in principle has been reached between the Atlanta franchise and True North to sell the team and bring it to Winnipeg.

There are still no confirmed details on how much True North will pay for the team, nor is there confirmation about what name the team will adopt when it begins the 2011-12 season in Winnipeg.

However, sources say the only thing left to seal the deal is the paperwork required by lawyers and the rubber-stamp approval from the league’s board of governors.

Time for the biggest impromptu street hockey game ever at the corner of Portage and Main this weekend?

I’d say that might be the most appropriate way to celebrate what is easily the best news for Winnipeg and Manitoba in decades.

I’ve had some friends from out east ask me why we think Winnipeg could support a National Hockey League franchise today when we couldn’t afford the Winnipeg Jets in the mid-1990s.

I spoke about that on Sun News TV this past week. It’s a valid question for the uninitiated.

It’s true, the NHL did price itself out of the Winnipeg market in the 1990s. We could no longer afford — under the existing scheme at the time — to pay for the soaring player salaries. The then-Filmon government even went as far as signing a “loss agreement” with the Jets ownership at the time, underwriting millions in team losses for several years. It was a gross misuse of taxpayer dollars.

What many people outside of Manitoba don’t understand, though, is that the whole hockey world in Winnipeg — and in the NHL — has changed since thousands of people took to the streets in the ’90s, pleading with anyone who would listen to “Save the Jets.”

There are the obvious changes. We now have a potential NHL owner who owns a modern hockey arena with access to all of the revenue streams associated with a busy entertainment complex.

In the 1990s, the Jets were renters in a city-owned building run by an arm’s-length city agency called Winnipeg Enterprises Corp. It was a disastrous business arrangement for an NHL club faced with soaring player costs.

The NHL and the NHLPA negotiated a new collective bargaining agreement several years ago that includes a salary cap, a salary floor and some revenue sharing. That’s key to having at least some control over escalating salaries.

Then there’s the dollar. At over a buck American, paying players in U.S. dollars is far more affordable today than when our dollar was between 65 and 85 cents U.S.

Our population is slightly higher than it was 15 years ago, which means there are more potential ticket buyers to draw from. And our economy is marginally better than it was in the mid-1990s.

Then there’s the intangible.

Anyone who lives here knows that pound-for-pound, per capita, this is one of the strongest hockey markets in the world. We may not be as rich monetarily as Toronto or Vancouver. But our propensity to spend our after-tax dollars on NHL hockey is as strong or stronger than most hockey markets in the world.

Winnipeg has not had NHL hockey for 15 years. My bet is that the pent-up demand for an NHL team in this city and the fact that we once lost a team and would never let it happen again, is going to make this new NHL franchise one of the most successful in the league.